Musings of a small press publisher & author of gay smut

My very first website was an online journal ~ they weren’t called “blogs” yet in 1996. Fourteen years ago, jeez. It wasn’t long after I learned HTML that I wanted to move from my free site at Geocities (remember them?) to a domain of my own. The first URL I ever bought was jherusalem.com, which is still mine today (it’s a landing pad for all my other sites).

A lot has changed since then. My first “blogs” were very much online journals ~ places for me to write about the daily business of living, working a 9-to-5 job I didn’t like, trying to break into print. It was only when my fiction career started to take off that journaling fell by the wayside. I was too busy writing my stories to bother writing about my life.

Once I began publishing, I made a conscious decision to focus my online presence to market my books. No more whiny blog posts, no more complaints, nothing that might rile people up and start something. For the most part, online drama has never interested me ~ I’m too damn busy to give a shit what someone half a world away says about me, you know? I didn’t care in high school what people thought and I sure as hell don’t care now.

Still, I realize that some of my loyal fans and faithful readers may want something more than just marketing buzz and new release promotions. Contests and free books are nice, but who’s the person behind them?

J.M. Snyder started out as my initials and quickly grew into an online brand. The journal entries I used to post online were probably better suited to my non-erotic writing pseudonym, J.T. Marie. I never realized I would probably need a different persona to write in a different genre ~ others do it, true, but I thought I’d sell more books under the name I’ve cultivated all these years. Turns out I was wrong, and since I started JMS Books LLC, J.T. Marie has come into her own.

I’m trying to get back into blogging ~ not just for promo but to keep writing, and to connect with readers again. This past year has seen quite a few upheavals in my life, not all of which are common knowledge, and as I move into this “more blogging” phase, I’d like to share with you what’s been going on and where things stand for me now. If nothing else, 2011 is the Year of Change for me, and while not all change is good, it’s inevitable, and can only lead you on.